The Constant Listener - Susan Herron Sibbet

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spectre of the famous Great Man left behind in his immense age and stature with no audience. It was to be several painful months before I would wholly understand his desolation and the bitter taste of ash—all that was left of his great fame and power. In my first enthusiasms, I believed his friends read his books, as I read them, and that seemed enough.

      Well, almost enough. At first, I did have some doubts about myself. Did I truly understand his work? But also I began to have my doubts about Mr. James. Did he understand what I needed as an amanuensis? It was true my speed increased with each day, and I slowly brought my nerves under control. My hand no longer shook while Mr. James read over each finished page, and soon enough, he simply paused while I pulled out the typed page and rolled in the fresh paper.

      With each new page, I was exhilarated. There were so many wonders. Mr. James poured out ideas that burst on me like fireworks, stories that broke my heart—lost loves, secrets revealed. I happily typed away, silent as Patience sitting on a monument, usually content and waiting for the next surprise.

      But not always. No matter what I have said about my thrill at being there, there was still a part of me that was young, proud, well educated, knowing everything, thinking I knew even more than Mr. James. I had studied my rhetoric, I had read the ancients, I knew what good writing sounded like, and I felt sometimes that this old man was off on some extravagant escapade of language or memory. Of course, I would take it all down because, after all, he was paying me to, but there was that proud part of me who knew better, who wanted to correct his excesses.

      Sometime during our first weeks, his love of alliteration got to me. Mr. James apparently adored the sound of words, especially how his own words sounded in his own voice with repeating letters, and even with certain letters—L’s were a favourite, and those pesky P’s. I remember one of the first prefaces. It was for “The Awkward Age,” and he was speaking of his first idea, the “germ” of his story. I was quietly tapping away, imagining along with him,

      “The seed sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself, for blest convenience, London Semicolon;”

      Some layer of my mind was agreeing with his description, Yes, that’s it, London is filled with possibilities.

      “. . . it fell even into the order of the minor Quotation “social phenomena End Quotation” with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles Full Stop.”

      But now, I was lost. “Nursery” . . . and then “fruit”? And now, a tree with “bristles”? Yet, nevertheless, my fingers tapped correctly in automatic response to his endless voice.

      “It was presumably present Comma, a fine purple peach.”

      His voice went on, but my mind was growling: Peaches are not purple, Mr. James. There’s too much of the letter P, Mr. James. But of course I kept on going, never saying a word. At least, I was cautious enough for that.

      The very next day, Mr. James came back with his corrections inked over the words from the day before. It was as if he had overheard the distaste in my mind for his alliteration, for he had changed that purple phrase, though it took a double negative to get him out of trouble, and he had kept most of the P’s, had even added to them: “It was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum . . .”

      I felt a surge of pride, my judgement exonerated.

      4

      “The Awkward Age”

      December 1907

      . . . the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and develop and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour it.

      —Henry James

      Preface to “The Awkward Age” The New York Edition, volume 9

      A telegram from my aunt Emily arrived, announcing she was to arrive in Rye the next day. She said she happened to be visiting with a friend and hoped to come over to spend the afternoon. Mr. James had asked for an entire morning’s work. That meant that the afternoon would be mine, and I could take her to all the sights in Rye. But, oh dear, she wanted to meet Mr. James and see where I was working. I could not have that happen. He would seem such a strange sort of person for Aunt Emily’s niece to be spending time with.

      Aunt Emily had always held high aspirations for me. Oh, not marriage and social position as the other aunts on my father’s side did. No, Emily was my dearest aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law. And I think I was always her favourite, too.

      I am not sure why I was special to her, because I was the wildest of all the cousins. Perhaps she liked me because I had most needed her help, or perhaps it was because I was quite different from what was expected. But whatever the reason, my aunt Emily always took notice of me, though I do not believe she understood me any better than any of the other aunts did, and there were plenty of other aunts, all of them aunts by marriage. My mother had only suitably business-minded brothers, six of them. They all were married, and Aunt Emily was married to the youngest, my uncle Ras, and lived in a big house in Kensington. As much as she liked me, not even Aunt Emily seemed to understand what I thought or cared about, even while I was young and still living with my father. No one understood why I enjoyed repairing bicycles. And I am sure that no one at home ever read one of Mr. James’ novels, for they hardly read any books at all.

      “Home”: What a strange-sounding word now, after all these years settled in London with Lady Rhondda—my Margaret—and with the Second Great War more than a decade behind us. Where was my home then, in those days when I first went to Rye? I was startled then if Mr. James suggested I go home on the days when his struggle to find the right words overcame him, when it appeared to me that he had spent too much time away from his dictation and had lost the thread.

      Even then, I thought it strange to call my boarding house and its cramped, cold room “home.” When forced to return home to that room, I was miserable; it was noisy and through the thin walls I heard voices, but those were voices of no one I knew or wanted to know. I felt quite lonely there. On cold winter days, that room was dark and even damp, and the old wall-paper was yellowed, greasy, while the one low-browed window opened only onto an unkempt patch of grass and the alley with its cans for cinders and rubbish.

      When I was young, I used to have a lovely room in our old, brown house across the road from my grandfather’s big house filled with Bosanquet uncles and aunts and cousins in Swansea, the older, more fashionable part of the Isle of Wight. My father was the youngest boy of eight. His eldest sisters, my aunts Bessie and Bert, were much older. I am sure they never approved of me, especially when I wanted to go to university, for they had very definite ideas about what a young lady—a well-behaved young niece—should be, and whatever that was, I was not that. I wish I had met my father’s younger sister, Georgie. She was most unusual. I had always heard that she’d never married, wore her hair cut off very short, rode horses, raised dogs, and was not at all like the other sisters. But she never came to visit.

      At first we lived near my Bosanquet grandfather, and I grew up believing the Bosanquets to be the busiest, most energetic of families, with our golf games at dawn, cricket before luncheon, croquet tournaments in the afternoon heat, and tennis round robins at tea-time.

      My father was happy and busy in those days, when he was assistant vicar in a big, popular church. I don’t remember his being at home often, fortunately not enough to notice much about me. I was an ungainly girl afraid to make many friends. My older cousins across the road, Queenie and the boys, fascinated me, but often they were busy, and so I would read or play alone with my cats; we always had two or three feline generations, mother and daughter and granddaughter, and they were my best friends.

      My mother and father liked it best when I was quiet. When my father was home, he was usually doing something in his study, and my mother was often in her room with the door closed. She always rested after lunch, every day of her life, a real rest, not a few minutes of sitting down with her eyes closed. No, she went up to her room

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